Philadelphia Athletic BBC

Established: 1860

Re-Constituted: 2010

The city of Philadelphia “had been a baseball town from the earliest days of the game”, fielding amateur teams since at least the early 1830s. In 1860, James N. Kerns formed a club, simply named “Athletic Base Ball Club”, that soon dominated amateur play in the area . When newspapers developed stand-alone game scores and league standings, the club was termed Athletic (Base Ball Club being dropped in any case). In prose the team was commonly called the Athletics, plural, and later generations have usually called both club and team the “Philadelphia Athletics”. Many famous 1860s matches occured between the Athletic and the Atlantic from Brooklyn which were chronicled in all of the major papers of the day and even Harper’s Weekly. In 1867 and 1868 they compiled tremendous records and were regarded as the best teams in the country.

The Athletics were one of the most successful National Association teams, winning the first pennant with a record of 21 wins and 7 losses (.750), two games ahead of the Boston Red Stockings and Chicago White Stockings. Actually, the race was much closer: the primary official criterion then was neither games nor winning percentage, but wins, and the three clubs finished in the order given with 21, 20, and 19 victories. The final game of the season, played on October 30 in Brooklyn, saw Athletic defeat Chicago, 4–1, clinching the title.While Boston dominated the NA, winning the other four pennants, the Athletics and New York Mutuals also fielded teams every year, with Philadelphia winning a few more games overall but never challenging Boston.